The immense value of NOT “achieving a useful consensus” around what we mean by “open” and staying in that deeply interesting conversation is precisely because when we foreclose it, when we leave it, we miss out on new understandings for ourselves, and close them down for others. It’s no surprise that some women with very different global perspectives, like Maha and Sarah Lambert (whose paper “Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education” inspired Maha to write today) would remind me why we need to keep definitions of open, open.

Nate Angell has made similar comments in the past

Others will doubtless continue this deeply interesting conversation and I wish them well as they do – I am in no way criticizing them as I withdraw from these conversations.

I’m convinced that the terms “open pedagogy” and “open educational practices” are understood so differently by so many people that there is literally no hope of achieving a useful consensus about the meaning of either of these terms. Some definitions are centered on OER. Some are centered on the public, linkable nature of the “open web.” Some are centered on social justice. Some are centered on collaboration. Some are centered on innovation. Some are centered on learner empowerment. Some are exercises in the permutations of these. There have even been arguments made that a clear definition would somehow be antithetical to the ideal of open. As I said, there appears to be no consensus coming for the meaning of either of these terms. For my own personal purposes of writing, researching, and advocating, the absence of a shared understanding of these terms removes any utility I previously hoped they had. Consequently, I don’t think I’ll use these terms any longer or participate in the discussion about their meanings going forward.

We learn by the things we do.

All of the activities that we associate with knowledge creation and other forms of scholarship are remix activities. They involve standing on the shoulders of giants, whether remixing existing knowledge in novel ways or combining previous understanding with genuinely new insight. Everything is a remix on one level or another.